Here we go with another “Al Gore may be too fat to be president” riff, this one written by Pop Machine‘s Mark Caro. And here’s another Caro thing about dumping the short film Oscars.

An early February Nikki Finke Deadline Hollywood Daily story ran the following quotes: (a) “If Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord knows [what he might do]” and (b) “Gore’s weight, which has ballooned since he left office, is widely seen as a barometer of his ambitions, and the Clinton, Obama and Edwards campaigns have been studying his girth closely.”

This ties in with Mick LaSalle‘s “fat Al” riff from a couple of months ago.

There’s also this weight thing I wrote about a year ago: “[An Inconvenient Truth] is very persuasive, but it would be a tad more so if Gore were a little bit thinner. He’s not Oliver Hardy but he looks very well fed, and the metaphor is obvious. The under-message of An Inconvenient Truth suggests that a new kind of austerity is vital for the earth’s survival, and I feel it would play better if Gore looked like someone who practices more denial.”